"Okay, so," I muttered, gesturing at a blueprint. "There's an even more efficient way of making thread, the spinning jenny. With that, one person can manage the spinning of a lot of yarns at once... but, it requires some reasonably refined input materials in the form of spools of roving. And so to really get the advantage out of this, we need a sequence of machines that can take washed and scoured but otherwise raw fibers, and then somehow process those into spools of roving fit to be spun into yarn."

"And do you happen to know what those machines are?" Rachel asked.

It was the next day; Rachel didn't have anything she needed to do, and so she was free to sit around and shoot the shit with me.

"I do not," I admitted. "But! I leveled up my Mechanics skill, so if I build some machines I do know about, then I should be able to figure out what the hell I'm supposed to do next! And... well, maybe also I should try actually doing some of this fiber processing shit myself, so that I can understand what the hell is going on and how to properly mechanize it."

"Well, if that is what you wish to do, there are many servants in House Nukem whose job is turning wool into thread," Rachel said. "I'm sure at least one of them will be perfectly willing to foist some of that work upon you as a learning experience."

"Hey, also, unrelated, but..." I said. "Pretty much everyone knows someone with a water affinity, right?"

"It's a fairly common affinity, yes," Rachel said, nodding.

"And so anyone can, at any time, find someone with the ability to change their body for them," I said.

"More or less," Rachel said. "Biosculpting is a somewhat limited skill without extensive practice, but for most cosmetic, beautifying uses, it works quite well even for an amateur."

"So..." I trailed off, gesturing meaningfully. "Why isn't everyone walking around looking like a fertility goddess?"

"...Because they don't want to, I suppose?" Rachel guessed.

"Well why the hell not?"

"Because while, yes, people do enjoy looking nice, and so put effort into dyeing their clothing and tailoring it in ways that look good, going to the healer so that they can look like a Beta Exemplar is rather more trouble than it's worth for most people," Rachel said. "In the halls of nobility and power, then yes, there you will find people altering their bodies for aesthetic appeal, but often not necessarily because it is what they most want to look like. There are well-established conventions for bodily proportions, and what they mean you are asserting in the great hall. Often, it means that minor nobility such as myself will take on forms conventionally considered uglier than how they normally appear, simply because that particular expression is appropriate for the context."

"In what ways?" I asked.

"Do you actually want a full-length lesson on aristocratic body language right now, or do you just want an example or two for the sake of conversation?" Rachel asked.

I considered my options carefully.

"...Let's go with the examples for now," I said. "Although I probably will need that full lesson by the time I finally present myself to your lord."

"Right, well," Rachel began. "There is the primary sexual display characteristic, which noble fashion is generally built around accentuating. For alphas, that characteristic is their penis, and for omegas, that characteristic is their breasts."

"What about betas?" I asked.

"Betas in general are very rare in the halls of power, and when they do make their way in, they are generally expected to present analogously to either an alpha or an omega. In addition, with the exception of beta exemplars, betas are not broadly considered sexy."

"Huh," I murmured. "Well, that's... something."

"Anyway, I was talking about primary sexual display characteristics," Rachel said. "For those, size is the most important quality for signaling purposes, with bigger meaning that one is asserting more social power. Naturally, if one has that power, then asserting it is an important part of maintaining it. But when one doesn't have that power, asserting it becomes laughable at best and a very rude challenge one cannot back up at worst."

"I see, I see," I said. "So, when you're in court, you keep your dick smaller than your lord's as a sign of submission?"

"Most would say loyalty, not submission, but yes," Rachel said. "For me to appear in court with a dick larger than hers would be to assert that I am stronger than her and do not need her, and that my position here is simply humoring her for my own reasons. Which would be, shall we say... politically inadvisable."

"I see, I see," I said, nodding. "Well. Anyway, going back to the textile stuff- because that's apparently all I can think about-"

"It's an important subject which occupies nearly half of the labor of everyone not in the nobility," Rachel pointed out, quite reasonably.

"Right. Well, I'm going to set aside the question of more mechanized thread-making for now. A spinning wheel that produces thread something like five to fifteen times faster than a spindle is going to have to be good enough."

"Fifteen-" Rachel started coughing. "O- Okay, that's. I'm now immensely curious about what could be an improvement on that-"

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Well, see, the spindle and the spinning wheel both demonstrate that, if you can spin a spindle and then feed fiber to it in a controlled manner, that fiber gets twisted into thread or yarn," I said. "So the spinning jenny and its later iterations mechanizes the process of feeding fiber to the spindle in a controlled manner, then hooks a bunch of such spindle assemblies to a common rotary drive shaft. So now, because you can make the drive shaft spin with water wheels or steam engines or whatever, you technically don't need a person to spin yarn at all! But of course you still do need someone to watch the machines, take finished spools off and put raw spools of roving on, and all that jazz. Let's say one individual spindle is half as efficient as a spinning wheel, since it does have finicky requirements, but then we get to the fact that one person can pretty easily manage, like, a hundred spindles at a time. So that's fifty times a spinning wheel, which itself is- let's say- ten times a spindle, meaning one person with a good-sized spinning jenny can do the work of five hundred peasants with drop spindles."

Rachel's coughing fit turned into wheezing.

"Anyway!" I said. "I wasn't going to talk more about the spinning jenny! I wanted to talk about knitting machines!"

"Knitting machines," Rachel rasped out. "You mean to tell me you know how to mechanize the process of knitting, a complex set of motions that uses a few sticks to turn yarn into socks."

"It's easier when you stop thinking about the sticks and start thinking about what the stitches mean," I said. "Well, it's conceptually easier. All you need is a sequence of hooked needles with freely-pivoting latches so that yarn can slide down out of the hook, and then back up and over the hook. It's harder in that making one of those hooked needles is non-trivial, and you need one for every stitch in a single row. Which can be rather a lot, even for just a sock, and not a full-sized knitted garment like a sweater or a stretchy tank top."

Rachel coughed a few times, and managed to compose herself.

"When we first met," she began. "You told me that your world, despite a lack of magic, was a wonderland of technologies we could scarcely imagine. Here and now, listening to you talk, I am starting to believe you."

"So, can you get me some more iron so I can make a knitting machine and churn out some socks?" I asked.

"I absolutely can," Rachel said.

----------------------------------------

Being as the knitting machine was made entirely of metal, including the detachable tripod stand I'd made out of iron- because iron was more abundant than wood- I did not strictly need to bring the prototype down to Rebecca Cartwright's shop. I did it anyways, though, because it was understood that they owed me some yarn, and also I wanted to show off my new toy to my new friends.

"Okay, so the yarn tension needs to be adjusted," I murmured.

"It's a good thing I wasn't too confident with this first spool and made sock yarn instead of proper thread," Siobhan Cartwright remarked.

"How is the spinning wheel working out for you, by the way?" I asked.

"I said first spool, didn't I?" Siobhan asked. "I've been able to make two pounds or so of good thread each day, which is about four of these spools. Before, with my spindle, I was able to make only a quarter of that in a day."

"Huh," I said. "I might have overestimated the efficiency of the spinning wheel, but, hell, it still puts yarn in our baskets, so I'm not about to whine about it. Still, it may be worth seeing if we could tweak it, make it even better... or, maybe, it's simply the case that you've been using a spindle your whole life, and switching to a wheel is a significant change, even for someone as skilled as you, and I'll have to wait longer than a week before you really get rolling." I let go of the yarn tensioner- really a bent piece of spring-wire with a loop on the end- and gave the handle another crank. "Theeeeeere we go. Now this is what I'm really happy about. I've done a bit of knitting before, and I reckon it'd take someone-" I remembered that, due to these people not having any timekeeping more accurate than sundials and songs, they did not know what a minute was. "-uh. A lot longer to knit one full row of a sock than this just took me."

"Improved how?" Rebecca asked, having apparently been infected with my enthusiasm for building textile machinery.

"Well, I bet we could make the flyer here spin even faster if we added an intermediate roller between it and the wheel," I said, continuing to crank the wheel and keep count of my rows. "Connect the wheel to the small side of the roller, and the flyer to the big side of the wheel, and you multiply the mechanical advantage even further."

"I'm not certain making it spin faster would let me, well, spin faster," Siobhan said. "I'd be willing to try it, but I'd like it if trying it didn't ruin my wheel."

"Nailing on the support for the extra roller shouldn't ruin the wheel, even if it doesn't work," I said. "It might make it look uglier, but you can always just disconnect the strings from the roller and go back to the old drive string." I reached a reasonable mid-calf length for the tube, and began to turn the heel, which would be somewhat of a pain, but not actually that hard. Just lift half the needles out of engagement, don't turn the crank all the way, and then slowly draw in towards the center, dropping one needle and raising two, and turning the crank back the other way. Then, when I reached the narrowest point of the heel- which I'd marked in the metal- I reversed the process, resumed regular knitting for the length of the foot- I had to make a rough estimate here for how long that should be, and made careful note of how many rows that was- before making the toe. This was, in fact, the same process as making the heel, except that, when I reached the end, I carefully stitched the opening shut.

The whole process took about twenty minutes, and ended with me carefully binding off the loose stitches from the first row with some extra thread.

"Et voila, a machine-knit sock," I said. "Sio, you wanna give it a try while I walk you through the methodology, make this sock's lost sister?"

"I'd be happy to," Siobhan said.

"Great!" I said. "Once you've got the hang of it, I'll trade you that there sock knitting machine for four pairs of black thigh-high stockings, to be delivered once you've gotten confident enough with the machine to make them."

Siobhan blinked a few times.

"Here now, I won't have you trying to seduce my wife," Rebecca said, grinning.

"I personally think a lady like her deserves two alphas, but that's up to her," I said idly.

"Your terms are very generous," Siobhan said carefully. "What... is the catch?"

"The catch is that I've asked you to make me some clothes," I said with a shrug. "Nothing more, nothing less. In exchange, I can afford to give you a sock-knitting machine, because I made it out of some iron bars in less time than it would take to knit a sock the hard way, and because I think that, as a person who tries to be good as an active practice, it's my responsibility to help people where I can. And giving you a machine that can make four socks an hour instead of a sock every two days is going to make life easier for you and for your neighbors, who I assume you trade household goods with."

"...Void bless you, Lucy," Siobhan said.

"The void has already blessed me," I said. "Now it's my turn to bless the people I share a world with."